Mobile devices with various methods of connectivity are now for many people becoming the primary gateway to the internet and also a major storage point for personal information. This is in addition to the normal range of personal computers and furthermore sensor devices plus internet based providers. Combining these devices together and lately the applications and the information stored by those applications is a major challenge of interoperability. This can be achieved through numerous, individual and personal information spaces in which persons, groups of persons, etc. can place, share, interact and manipulate (or program devices to automatically perform the planning, interaction and manipulation of) webs of information with their own locally agreed semantics without necessarily conforming to an unobtainable, global whole.
Furthermore, in addition to information, the information spaces may be combined with webs of shared and interactive computations or computation spaces so that the devices having connectivity to the computation spaces can have the information in the information space manipulated within the computation space environment and the results delivered to the device, rather than the whole process being performed locally in the device. It is noted that such computation spaces may consist of connectivity between devices, from devices to network infrastructure, to distributed information spaces so that computations can be executed where enough computational elements are available. These combined information spaces and computation spaces often referred to as computation clouds, are extensions of the ‘Giant Global Graph’ in which one can apply semantics and reasoning at a local level.
In one example, clouds are working spaces respectively embedded with distributed information and computation infrastructures spanned around computers, information appliances, processing devices and sensors that allow people to work efficiently through access to information and computations from computers or other devices. An information space or a computation space can be rendered by the computation devices physically presented as heterogeneous networks (wired and wireless). On the other hand, different levels of proactive, reactive or a mixture of computational elements may be available to the device in various other components of various architectural levels (e.g. device level, infrastructure level, etc.), wherein different distributed components may have different capabilities and support different processes. In various example circumstances, to enhance the information processing power of a device and reduce the processing cost, one might consider minimizing or at least significantly improving exchange of data, information and computations among the distributed components within a computational environment by providing multi-level distributed computations, such that the data can be migrated to the closest possible computation level with minimized or improved cost.
However, despite the fact that information and computation presented by the respective levels of computation environment can be distributed with different granularity, still there are challenges in certain example implementations to achieve scalable high context information processing within such heterogeneous environments. For example, in various implementations, due to distributed nature of the environment, (e.g., devices, infrastructures, and clouds), data, information, and computation elements (e.g., computation closures) are being exchanged among distributed devices within heterogeneous network environments wherein information with various levels of granularity and various structures is provided by and transmitted among various independent sources (e.g. owners). In such environments, achieving the end-to-end privacy of exchanged information and computation closures, development time and runtime authentication and contextual validation is an important issue.